Friday Noon Lecture Series
Impact of New Information Resources: Multimedia and Networks

The Information Highway Has Many Potholes

Equity, privacy, commercialization, and access are all important policy factors
that must be addressed in determining the nature of the proposed National
Information Infrastructure (NII). In this semi-informal talk, Dr. Simons gave us a preview of the panel discussion on this topic that she will be
chairing the following Monday at the American Association for the Advancement
of Science. In looking at policy issues, she examined the functioning of
current systems, in particular the Internet and the Minitel System in France,
citing Minitel as a successful example of a telecommunications system with
almost universal access. Audience participation was encouraged.

Dr. Simons is a Fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of
Science (AAAS) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). In 1992 she
was awarded the CPSR Norber Wiener Award for Professional and Social
Responsibility in Computing. She chairs the ACM U.S. Public Policy Committee.
Dr. Simons was ACM secretary in 1990 - 92, and prior to that she was chair of
the ACM Committee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights. She was a co-founder
of the U.C. Berkeley Computer Science Department Reentry Program for Women and
Minorities.

Dr. Simons received her Ph.D. in computer science in 1981 from UC Berkeley. In
1980 she joined the Research Division of IBM, and she is currently a member of
the Language Products Technology Institute at IBM Santa Teresa Laboratory where
her main areas of research are compiler optimization and scheduling. She is
coauthor of "Fault-Tolerant Distributed Computing," which is based on a workshop
that she organized.